Guiding Coalition
Creating the Guiding Coalition
Major transformations are often associated with one highly visible individual. Consider Chrysler's come back from near bankruptcy in the early 1980s, and we think of Lee Iacocca. Mention Wal-Mart's ascension from small-fry to industry leader and Sam Walton comes to mind. Read about IBM's efforts to renew itself, and the story centers around Lou Gerstner. After a while, one might easily conclude that the kind of leadership that is so critical to any change can come only from a single larger than life person.
This is a very dangerous belief.
Because major change is so difficult to accomplish, a powerful force is required to sustain the process. No one individual, even a monarch-like CEO, is ever able to develop the right vision, communicate it to large numbers of people, eliminate all the key obstacles, generate short-term wins, lead and manage dozens of change projects, and anchor new approaches deep in the organization's culture. Weak committees are even worse. A strong guiding coalition is always needed-one with the right composition, level of trust, and shared objective. Building such a team is always an essential part of the early stages of any effort to restructure, reengineer, or retool a set of strategies.
1. Going It Alone: The Isolated CEO
The food company in this case had an economic track record between 1975 and 1990 that was extraordinary. Then the industry changed, and the firm stumbled badly.
The CEO was a remarkable individual. Being 20 percent leader, 40 percent manager, and the rest financial genius, he had guided his company successfully by making shrewd acquisitions and running a tight ship. When his industry changed in the late 1980s, he tried to transform the firm to cope with the new conditions. And he did so with the same style he had been using for fifteen years that of a monarch, with advisors.
"King" Henry had an executive committee, but it was an information-gathering/dispensing group, not a
Major transformations are often associated with one highly visible individual. Consider Chrysler's come back from near bankruptcy in the early 1980s, and we think of Lee Iacocca. Mention Wal-Mart's ascension from small-fry to industry leader and Sam Walton comes to mind. Read about IBM's efforts to renew itself, and the story centers around Lou Gerstner. After a while, one might easily conclude that the kind of leadership that is so critical to any change can come only from a single larger than life person.
This is a very dangerous belief.
Because major change is so difficult to accomplish, a powerful force is required to sustain the process. No one individual, even a monarch-like CEO, is ever able to develop the right vision, communicate it to large numbers of people, eliminate all the key obstacles, generate short-term wins, lead and manage dozens of change projects, and anchor new approaches deep in the organization's culture. Weak committees are even worse. A strong guiding coalition is always needed-one with the right composition, level of trust, and shared objective. Building such a team is always an essential part of the early stages of any effort to restructure, reengineer, or retool a set of strategies.
1. Going It Alone: The Isolated CEO
The food company in this case had an economic track record between 1975 and 1990 that was extraordinary. Then the industry changed, and the firm stumbled badly.
The CEO was a remarkable individual. Being 20 percent leader, 40 percent manager, and the rest financial genius, he had guided his company successfully by making shrewd acquisitions and running a tight ship. When his industry changed in the late 1980s, he tried to transform the firm to cope with the new conditions. And he did so with the same style he had been using for fifteen years that of a monarch, with advisors.
"King" Henry had an executive committee, but it was an information-gathering/dispensing group, not a